Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History

by Jori Lewis

Overview

Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship

Winner, Harriet Tubman Prize

“Slaves for Peanuts plumbs a fascinating and disturbing slice of history, shining a light on another glaring example of Western hypocrisy and oppression.” —NPR Books

“A complex story crossing time and oceans” (National Public Radio), Jori Lewis’s prizewinning Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. “With elegant prose and engaging details” (Pulitzer Prize–winner Imani Perry), Lewis reveals how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled.

“This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism” (Publishers Weekly), recreating a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is “told in rich detail through the eyes of West African men and women” (Civil Eats)—from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism—who challenge our most basic assumptions of the motives and people who supported human bondage.

At a time when Americans are grappling with the enduring consequences of slavery, here is a new and revealing chapter in its global history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620979174
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. In 2018, she received the prestigious Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction. Lewis splits her time between Illinois and Senegal, and Slaves for Peanuts (The New Press) is her first book.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Part I

1 A Shelter for Runaway Slaves 3

2 A Crossroads 12

3 A Spark, a Solution, the Industrial Revolution 16

4 From Here to There and Back Again 22

5 A Peanut Ruse 30

6 The Legend of Ndakaaru 34

7 The Caravan 36

8 Those of the Sand 39

9 A Middleman 42

Part II

10 The People Who Came from the Sea 53

11 The African Business 59

12 Unholy Wars 64

13 A Word on Slavery 68

14 This Black Man from Gorée 72

15 Lat Joor Wants His Slaves Back 76

Part III

16 A Sickness with No Name 83

17 A Native Evangelist 88

18 Ceebu Jën 95

19 A Steamboat on Land 100

20 The Ebbs and Flows of My Courage 104

Part IV

21 Saxayaay 113

22 Springtime in Paris 115

23 Reports from the Rivers 121

24 A New Appeal 127

25 The Fifteen Captives of Ndiack Ndiaye 131

26 The Future of France 139

27 A Word on Freedom 147

28 The Civilizing Mission 150

29 A Stain That Must Be Washed 159

Part V

30 A Delicate Business 165

31 You Will Find Only Jackals and Hyenas 171

32 A Colleague and a Partner 175

33 Since the Invention of the Peanut 182

34 Special Seeds 185

35 Interregnums 190

36 The Propagation of French Culture? 195

Part VI

37 The Darnel 205

38 Bethesda 207

39 Poor Lat Joor 211

40 Go East! 215

41 The Dawn of a New Era 223

42 We Have Already Proven That the Negro Is Capable 231

Part VII

43 Lost and Found (Ephemera) 237

44 Why Have the Peanuts Degenerated? 239

45 Kerbala 242

46 On the Run 247

47 Your Civilization Has Not Dazzled Him 253

48 This Land of My Ancestors 256

Part VIII

49 A Peanut Fable 263

50 One of the Most Delicate Questions 266

51 A Child from the Dark Continent 272

52 Emaciated Lands 277

53 Drink My Cup to the Dregs 280

54 The Crushing Supremacy of the Peanut 285

55 What Remained 289

Epilogue 293

Acknowledgments 299

A Note on Sources 301

Notes 303

Index 363

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Slaves for Peanuts:
“A rich and very readable overview of people and peanuts in nineteenth-century West Africa.”
—World Literature Today

“Slaves for Peanuts is a valuable addition to agricultural and West African history.”
—Nature

“The geopolitical game Lewis describes in Slaves for Peanuts is an old one, and one essential to the formation of the modern world.”
—Africa Is a Country

"Slaves for Peanuts plumbs a fascinating and disturbing slice of history, shining a light on another glaring example of Western hypocrisy and oppression.”
—NPR Books

"[Slaves for Peanuts] unearths the stories of African kingdoms and colonial settlements, showing how demand for peanut oil in Europe drove the expansion of the peanut trade in Senegal in the 19th century and ensured that slavery and indentured labor in West Africa would continue long after the Europeans had abolished it."
—Civil Eats

“Astute and distressing. . . . This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Within these pages, you’ll encounter plagues and palace intrigues, adventures and misadventures, kingmakers and kingbreakers, fortunes won and lost—all wrapped around the mighty peanut! In well-researched, engaging prose, Jori Lewis unravels the intimate connections between this major export crop, enslavement, and abolition on Senegambian soil. The wars fought over it, and the history that surrounds it. This work is an important contribution to African historiography.”
—Sandra Jackson-Opoku, author of The River Where Blood Is Born and co-editor of Revise the Psalm

“In this whirlwind tour with the yellow-blossomed peanut across the Atlantic world, journalist Jori Lewis skillfully unveils the intertwined and troubling trajectory of plants, people, slavery, and colonialism. Slaves for Peanuts is a broad, complex, and unexpected environmental history vibrantly told.”
—Tiya Miles, professor of history, Harvard University, and author of All That She Carried

“Slaves for Peanuts is a revelation. With elegant prose and engaging details, Lewis uncovers a vital history that promises to transform our understanding of slavery and colonialism. Though focused on a single crop, this terrain is vast and deep. I highly recommend this outstanding work.”
—Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University, and author of Breathe

“Jori Lewis’s superbly readable book does more than bring life to something we all too often ignore: the history of slavery in Africa. She has also found a sort of African version of the Underground Railroad. And all of this is connected to an everyday food whose history we seldom think of.”
—Adam Hochschild, journalist, historian, lecturer, and bestselling author of King Leopold’s Ghost

“Slaves for Peanuts is an extraordinary and often tender work of meticulous research that spans time and continents, an insightful and captivating narrative of how slavery in Africa supported industrialization in the West, and how enslaved people took back their freedom. I am in awe of the authoritative care with which Jori Lewis lays out the entangled relationships between white supremacy, capitalism, food, and the indefatigable human agency. A must-read that illustrated the long-standing history of the many ways in which the African continent has been for centuries paying the price for the comforts of the Global North.”
—Anna Badkhen, author of Fisherman’s Blues

“Jori Lewis has achieved the nearly impossible task of educating us about peanuts, a vegetable juggernaut that has changed the world, while recounting stories of slavery and freedom, all presented with extraordinary nuance and humanity. Slaves for Peanuts is a triumph of deep research and engaging writing.”
—Andrés Reséndez, professor, department of history, University of California, Davis, and author of The Other Slavery

“In this magnificently researched, beautifully told narrative history, Jori Lewis brings the roiling story of slavery and liberation in West Africa to life. By combing through stacks of archived documents on three continents, she masterfully weaves a rich tale of African kingdoms and European ‘civilizers’; of unbathed Englishmen and mystical priestesses; of camel caravans and railroad bandits; of imperial decrees, epic poems, and forests in the mist. At the center of it all stands the towering figure of an African protestant pastor and liberator; and, not far away, the fertile soils that would send the humble, mighty peanut to distant shores, and into history.”
—Sandy Tolan, professor of journalism, USC Annenberg, and bestselling author of The Lemon Tree

From the Publisher

01/10/2022

Journalist Lewis, who is based in Senegal, debuts with an astute and distressing history of the links between slavery and peanut farming in 19th-century west Africa. According to Lewis, the rising demand for high-quality peanut oil for the European soap-making industry encouraged French colonial officials to ignore kidnapping and slave trading in the region, despite France’s abolition of slavery in 1848. Noting that most of the enslaved’s lives were poorly documented, Lewis relies heavily on the letters and records of Protestant missionary Walter Taylor. Originally from Sierra Leone, Taylor graduated from a French seminary and founded the Shelter for Runaway Slaves in Senegal, which helped fugitives obtain their “freedom papers.” His heartfelt letters detail the struggles of west Africans caught between local chiefs and European officials, their efforts to preserve their cultural traditions, and the machinations of Lewis’s mentor turned nemesis, François Villéger, whose racist attitudes undermined Taylor’s missionary work. Lewis’s skillful mining of Taylor’s records and her own immersion in Senegalese culture results in a fascinating exploration of regional loyalties and the intricacies of western African slavery. This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly